The Saragossa Manuscript

The Saragossa Manuscript (Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie, 1966) is Wojciech Has's Polish cult film you can watch online on iFILM. Two officers on a Napoleonic battlefield find an old book and forget the war, swallowed up by the tales inside it.

The book turns out to be the memoir of one man's grandfather, a Walloon guard named Alphonse van Worden. Looking for a shortcut through the wild Sierra Morena, he beds down in an abandoned inn and tumbles into a spiral of stories: two Moorish princesses, a gallows with two corpses, a hermit, a cabbalist, a gypsy chief. Each character tells a tale that hides another tale within it, and then another. The black-and-white film runs three hours and folds together like a puzzle box.

Adapted from Jan Potocki's novel, Has built a labyrinth adored by Luis Buñuel, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola — and Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia bankrolled the restoration of its full cut. Zbigniew Cybulski, Poland's answer to James Dean, leads the cast. This one rewards patient viewers happy to get lost in nested plots. Stream The Saragossa Manuscript (1966) online on iFILM.